Works on VIDEO
The evolution of an ever changing painting practice. There is no final picture, no final painting. That is destroyed. What we see is process within time and space - the place where the artist works. The artwork is the video that captures stages of the evolving image.
The sound collage is mostly background sound with birds and
What is it that makes hand-made, time taking art different that the immediacy of the digital age and of Ai imaging. This video captures the many decisions that an artist takes to play and discover and find something on the canvas they didn't expect. As this video took several days of shooting, sessions being about an hour or two each and working twice a day. Each stage is captured by the camera as a still frame. The artwork was then "lived with" as the artist made changes, based not on prompts and detections and projections of patterns, but on impulses from the mind but also the body and the actions, experiences and stories of the day. The artwork is lived with. In order to create an interesting image through Ai image generating, I might only make ten decisions as I write the prompt. Maybe another ten decisions as I cull through and curate my favorite images and deciding on the one.
The idea of capturing the developing artwork is not new. I credit in a large way the film "Mystery of Picasso" by Henri-Georges Clouzot. In that film I was able to understand perhaps, a little more about how Picasso worked. I was riveted as I watched that film on the large screen of the Castro Theatre in San Francisco around 2001. I felt Picasso was giving me the chance to see how to approach a canvas and change it dramatically in one minute and then change it again the next. I will always remember the cup that becomes the fish and becomes a face and becomes a chicken! I see imagination before my eyes but also the act of seeing one thing and then also seeing another - as in Pareidolia, or "seeing the face in the clouds." There was that and there was the treatment of backgrounds. The sky, first a blue field of white stars suddenly becomes a salmon-pink backdrop, at first a red sky but suddenly the interiors of a room and the reclining woman who keeps changing in style and shape suddenly becomes a bull and the final paint seems to be the bull howling at the yellow moon painted in that expressive cubism.
For me the concern wasn't with a final image. The concern was the flow and fluidity of creative decisions and imagination reflected in the changes upon a canvas. My goal was not to paint some final picture. The goal was to go through many ideas, shapes, objects, styles, and then morph into a new area as I had seen in my Pareidolic mind a line of flowering trees that suddenly become a row of women in colorful dresses but change and eventually the dancers appear who suddenly are wearing green.